[CLUE-Talk] Gentoo is installed

[Evan Widger]

Well i got a new (for me) laptop early last week. (gifts from the recycling
bin are fun, don't worry, the guys in charge said it was ok). It's a Compaq
Armada 7400, PIIm 333/128mb ram, 4gb hdd (now partitioned into 1.5/win and
2.change/linux) with built in modem and a xircom pcmcia 10/100nic.

I started thursday by downloading (overnight) the gentoo 1.4 basic livecd.
(aparently took some 5 hours on dialup) friday after getting off work i
popped the cd in, started partitioning what i'd resized with partition
magic, and followed the instructions. i hit bootstrap.sh and left that on
overnight. woke up saturday to find zlib errors and
freenode.net/#gentoo-bugs said there was a new bootstrap.sh version.
restarted bootstrap.sh. woke up sunday and started emerge system, emerged
gnetoo-dev-kernel (2.6.0-test9 with gentoo patches) and let that download
overnight. got home from work yesterday and spent an hour in make
menuconfig, trying to make sure i got everything right. compiled the kernel.
it boots. left laptop off overnight to make sure it doesn't die an early
death after so much work this weekend.

a couple of the things in the kernel aren't right. hdparm won't let me set
dma on the hdd, so i think i have to go back and figure out what chipset
this really is (lspci just says compaq northstar rev 2.0 ) and turn off a
couple options that it turns out i don't need. out of the whole process the
kernel compile was probably one of the fastest, i guess i have good cflags
for this machine. what kernel i do have does boot very fast and i have next
to no programs yet but everything works AFAIK (i.e. i can get online with
the nic, etc.)

other than the hdd dma issue (dma is enabled in bios and works in windows)
the only other issue i have is getting the console to fill the whole screen.
it's a 13.3inch 1027x768 TFT lcd, but when i boot all the characters are
stretched out. i did find that hitting f10 (the key to normally get in the
bios, though it doesnt work, added a section in lilo.conf for the
on-hard-drive compaq diags stuff so i can get in ther) it displays at normal
text size, but only takes up the center of the screen. anyone have any
ideas? i'm pretty sure i enabled framebuffer support in the kernel, and
turned it on in lilo.conf but i might have done that wrong. anybody
especially geeky can check my kernel .config here
http://www.widgetron.net/.config and tell me anythign i should have turned
on but didn't, or turned on bout shouldn't have.


all in all i'm happy with gentoo so far, it's very interesting and lots of
fun to build it from near scratch, i've learned a ton about how linux/unix
works at the very low levels. sorry this has gone on so long but i figure
someone can learn from my experience.

- Evan Widger
   PsychoI3oy at linkline.com